A New Blog Post from a New DH Fellow

A New Blog Post from a New DH Fellow

Hi! My name is Laurel Myers and I am a junior from the cornfields of Cedarville, Ohio. Even though I am an English major, I am having a deceptively hard time writing this intro blog, which is probably due to the fact that I don’t have much experience with Digital Humanities.

I stumbled upon the field and the fellowship opportunity this summer when I was trying to find a job on campus. With a six-week gap in the middle of my summer due to attending the Virginia Program at Oxford, I needed a flexible job that I could start and come back to. Thankfully, there was a project that had been sitting on the shelves for three years that was waiting to be catalogued. Special Collections had acquired the personal library of Thomas H. Carter, a literary critic and former editor of Shenandoah who had personal correspondence with Ezra Pound. I spent the summer collecting data and creating spreadsheets about his books, journals, and connections in the literary world. I am looking forward to taking my project further throughout the academic year as a DH fellow and using the information I gathered to form a comprehensive narrative about Carter that can act as a snapshot of the literary scene during the 50s.

At the moment, I am in two classes that bring together my DH project: a 20th Century British and Irish Poetry class and a Digital Humanities class. In the poetry class, we will be investigation the correspondence between Carter and Pound and also creating a journal of our own. With the Digital Humanities class, taught by Mackenzie Brooks, I will be able to work on my coding skills and learn new ways to present my research.

As an English major who also takes as many Spanish courses as possible, I saw an enormous advantage in learning more about the Digital Humanities. Being a part of DH @ WLU, I will not only gain an invaluable skillset, but also be challenged. Expanding my limited knowledge of coding while also designing platforms to showcase my project is an exciting application of what I have learned during my college career at W&L so far.